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Education and Technology

This site is maintained by me, Alec McEachran. I used to be a professional mathematics and philosophy teacher in the UK, but now work as a games and interactive software engineer in San Francisco. I am interested in the potential of technology to transform the experience of teaching and learning.

Technology does far more than just present the same information through a different medium. The adoption of the Soroban Abacus in Japan circa 1600 had a transformational effect on their population’s numeracy and remains widely used today. The soroban acts as a scaffold that facilitates its users to interact with number visually and kinesthetically, in a way that was previously impossible.

Modern technology has a potential orders of magnitude larger. Educational games and rich interactive simulations can reshape students’ experiences of learning difficult concepts. Games and simulations offer a sandbox in which students can experiment free from the fear of failure. They can stimulate engagement and increase attention. They can assess users’ abilities and tune their experience appropriately, and even reduce the need for stressful formal assessments.

We are only beginning to understand how technology can transform to how we learn and study.

For more resources, information and opinion about education, please check out my blog.